Lufthansa Technik, a provider of aircraft maintenance, repair, and overhaul (MRO) services, is teaming up with Microsoft to drive forward the use of artificial intelligence (AI).
Designed to optimize entire maintenance processes, the approach aims to significantly improve efficiency or even lead to completely new offers.
“We are excited about our collaboration with Microsoft,” says Dr. William Willms, chief financial officer of Lufthansa Technik. “This partnership will allow us to harness the power of AI to solve highly complex challenges, improve our operations, and deliver exceptional value to our customers.”
The initiative includes over 50 context-sensitive AI use cases based on Microsoft Azure AI Services and the Microsoft Azure cloud.
One use case is the optimization of layover planning, which has been designed to save costs by reducing ground time by five to 10%.
“AI is the pivotal technology of our time. It not only enables incredible breakthroughs that could hardly have been imagined before. In its development, security and data protection have the highest priority for us and for Lufthansa Technik,” says Florian Deter, managing director at Microsoft Germany.
By utilizing large language models (LLMs) provided via Azure AI Services and a memory-enabled cognitive architecture, Lufthansa Technik aims to distill knowledge from vast amounts of data, including unstructured data such as work instructions.
Much of the information is also hidden in sources such as code, folder structures, images, or charts. To answer complex questions effectively, this knowledge must be made accessible and linked to other data. It will be used to solve tasks autonomously, optimising procedures and disruptively transforming the industry.
The collaboration with Microsoft is part of “Digitize the Core”, an initiative by Lufthansa Technik design to drive forward the digitization of the company’s core operational processes.
